The Search!

My dog took me for a walk in the hot heat of the afternoon---and she knew enough to head for the woods.  Sorry Caesar "Dog Whisperer," I am very big on letting the dog explore on a long leash....and even make the pathway ahead for us.  She followed the stream bed and the humidity hung like clouds about us.  Just then, bounding out of the bed, two fawns dashed away for about 30 feet -- and then just stopped almost on cue together to look back at us.  The dog just stood still.  And though I could not see her, I felt the presence of their mother--there, unseen yet watching her offspring with their instinct for life.

Now, I don't know if she was really there. The twins looked young to be out on their own, and no doubt this was a late litter in the season.  But I do think that the primal connection with the mother is carried in us.  I felt that presence.  The fawns, in other words, evoked that sense of the mother's presence in me.  


Our neurologists remind us that there is a conditioning between the mother and fetus in utero. There is evidence to the degree that we maintain that connection after birth--the infant knowing the mother's voice.  I am after something far deeper. Camus and the whole existentialist school wrote about the search for connection once separated from our mothers.  John Paul II wrote that "we leave our mother's body and go in search of the Body you give us."  Namely--the Body of Christ.    Maybe we carry that sense of lost connection in us for which only the search for the Other will do. 

"We all flow from one fountain; - Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided curents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all."
                                                                                   ~ John Muir ~